Here is a genuinely strange and yet really intriguing film made by the American naturalist and documentary-maker Jessica Oreck: it's a study of Japan's occult fascination with bugs and beetles of all sorts. The Japanese keep them in their apartments, where their susurrations and chirrupings are sweet music. They are kept as pets – more than pets, actually, more like sacred cows. There is artwork and comics depicting beetles. They have videogames based on the life of beetles. The Japanese are beetle-crazy. Why? Are they like British twitchers, who spend hours on end in hides watching birds? Sort of. But Oreck suggests there is some deeper cultural and philosophical attachment that Japan has with beetles. Their reverence is connected partly with the very fact that these animals might otherwise be beneath humans' notice as trifling, irritating or disgusting. On the contrary: they emerge in this film as exotic and beautiful. They chime with the Japanese genius for miniaturisation, for the exquisite smallness of the haiku and with the religious vision of Shinto, which sees God and man connected in all nature. Insects are sentient life at the micro-level, the molecular level; their thrum and buzz is the noise of nature itself. What an original and distinctive film this is.